


Who Follow the First

by Cherepashka



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Families of Choice, Finn starts a revolution, Finn the revolutionary, Humor, Identity, Revolution, Stormtrooper Culture, Stormtrooper Defections, Stormtrooper Rebellion, also dark humor, and other coping mechanisms, processing past trauma, troubled childhoods
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-10
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-01 08:37:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6510856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“There are <em>more</em>?” Finn said—or rather squawked, Poe thought, as Finn’s voice went amusingly and predictably high. </p><p>This was the fifth time deserters from the First Order had made their way to a Resistance base, and yet for Finn the surprise didn’t seem to be wearing off at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Descents

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [have you heard](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5798602) by [peradi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peradi/pseuds/peradi). 



> (Which is an understatement; it might be more accurate to call this an unabashed homage).
> 
> [have you heard](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5798602/chapters/13364887) was in turn inspired by [Tomorrow (there'll be more of us)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5648131) by [dimircharmer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer), which was in turn inspired by [The Story of Finn](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5594782/chapters/12891928) by [LullabyKnell](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LullabyKnell/pseuds/LullabyKnell). You should go read all of those if you haven't. Or even if you have.
> 
> This story also owes its existence to [delicious upholstery](http://archiveofourown.org/users/polly_oliver/pseuds/delicious%20upholstery), who (a) dropped me into the sub-fandom, and (b) absolutely insisted the rest get written when I floated the first bit.
> 
> See chapter endnotes for warnings.

Word spread.

_FN-2187 lives._

At first they were cautious. Few who had been stationed on Starkiller Base had survived its destruction; even fewer of those were willing to speak of what they had seen, or not seen, or surmised. Those who had been on Jakku seemed equally close-mouthed. And yet, some of them must have spoken, at some time; for who else would the ones who later said _I heard…_ , have heard it from? 

_FN-2187 lives._

Over time, the ones who heard watched out for others: for the sharpshooters from training who missed every shot in battle, for the mechanics who covered for a sick deckhand during a captain’s inspection, for the fighters who made effort to remember the designations of the fallen. These ones they would seek out later, in alcoves or on catwalks, in loading bays and airlocks, and pass on the whisper: _I heard…._ And so word spread, quietly, from stormtrooper to stormtrooper, from pilot to mechanic, from one hooded or helmeted face to another. 

_FN-2187 lives._

The story changed, never the same from one telling to the next. _I heard he was the best gunner in his squad. I heard he escaped a whole wing of TIE fighters._ The whispers grew and spread, less plausible each time, until hearsay became legend became something like religion. _I heard he freed a dozen Resistance prisoners that General Hux had in interrogation. I heard he disabled an entire Resurgent-class Star Destroyer, and all he had was his blaster and a grappling hook._ They spread until the tales themselves became so farfetched that everyone knew they weren’t offered for the truth, but for the telling. _I heard he didn’t just disable it—he blew it into space dust. I heard he fought a lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren, and lived._

Always, it came back to that: _FN-2187 lived._

 _FN-2187_ lives.

He picked up other names along the way: the Deserter, the Resistor, the Survivor, titles chanted silently as mantras by stormtroopers going into battle, or murmured as talismans against an officer’s cruelty or Ren’s fits of temper. Half a dozen epithets, none traceable to any one source, so of course no one knew who started calling him the First—but that was the title that soon spread furthest, took deepest root. Part of it was the way the name drew from and yet defied the First Order. But mostly it was something else: if FN-2187 was the First, it promised there would be more. 

* * *

“There are _more_?” Finn said—or rather squawked, Poe thought, as Finn’s voice went amusingly and predictably high. 

This was the fifth time deserters from the First Order had made their way to a Resistance base, and yet for Finn the surprise didn’t seem to be wearing off at all. If anything, he’d gotten progressively more surprised with each arrival of a bedraggled stormtrooper ship. 

The first had been more than two standard months ago, a full season by D’Qar time, mere days after Finn had been up and walking again. The soldiers on watch duty for the third quadrant called in an unidentified craft, and Poe, just returned from a grim recovery mission to the remnants of Hosnian Prime, started suiting up. The Hosnian Prime run had almost turned deadly when Red Squadron had stumbled upon a First Order wing carrying out their own salvage operation, and even though Poe’s team had escaped without casualties, he was still on edge. Soldiers on the ground brought the Resistance cannons around (all of the Resistance’s materiel, cannons included, was at least thirty years old, _why_ couldn’t the New Republic have upgraded their cannons before getting tragically blown up—no, don’t think about the fragments of metal and rock where the Hosnian system had been, don’t think about it, just think about the cannons), and they waited for a better read on the craft. 

It wasn’t until it dropped out of low orbit and into a landing arc that they realized why they hadn’t been able to identify it before: it had once been a cargo freighter, but now it was stripped down to pretty much just the bridge, engines, and hyperdrive, leaving a conspicuous absence of cargo hold where most of the ship had been. The word came over their comms: “First Order insignia—that’s an enemy ship.”

Poe waited by his X-wing with BB-8 for the order to take off and intercept, but something seemed off. The freighter—well, former freighter—was alone, flying wobbly, and now Poe could make out scorch marks on the bridge and hull. BB-8 trilled, and Poe agreed.

“She’s wounded,” he said into his helmet microphone, setting the broadcast mode to include HQ. 

He heard Admiral Ackbar’s voice saying, “I don’t trust this. I think it’s a—”

“We’ll let them land,” General Organa interrupted. “Black Leader, you’re flying escort.” Poe grinned. He could always shoot the freighter later, if he had to, but for now it was more interesting to see what it might bring. 

“Yes, sir. Black Leader escort service on its way, and a prettier escort they’ve never had—oops, sorry, was my comm on for that last—”

“Get in the air, Dameron. Now.” 

Poe grinned wider, which he knew the General couldn’t see, gave an exaggerated salute from his cockpit, which she definitely _could_ see, and took off. BB-8 whistled a scolding at him, which he cheerfully ignored. He was pretty sure his skill as a pilot came in a distant second to his delightful humor on the list of reasons General Organa kept him around, but just in case, he made sure to cut low enough over the heads of the gathered Resistance members to make them duck and remind her that he was the best flyer on D’Qar.

From the air, the freighter looked even worse, not just scorched but pocked and dented, and as Poe dipped his wings toward the bridge (from which the pilot would hopefully understand Poe’s intended meaning of _Look, my lasers are pointing at you but they’re not live, so let’s make this a nice, easy, violence-free landing_ , but then who knew what flight signals they taught First Order pilots, maybe dipped wings meant _Let’s see how much of each other’s craft we can fry in the next eight seconds_ ), he could see that the cargo hold hadn’t been deliberately decoupled but actually _shot off_. He allowed himself a moment of grudging respect for the unseen pilot who was still managing to keep this limping rust-bucket in the air. 

But only barely. Poe winced as the freighter pitched alarmingly, then seemed to right itself for a second as he guided it toward the landing bay. A moment later it rolled, missed the bay, and plowed into the adjacent greenery, coming to rest on its side. His own X-wing touched down light and graceful as a bird—sure, Poe Dameron got as much of an adrenaline high from combat as the next pilot, but damn if a perfect landing didn’t rank up there with sex among the galaxy’s most satisfying achievements. It never got old. (He also didn’t have too many opportunities to pull one off; somehow a disproportionate number of his landings wound up in the “barely-controlled crash” category. Funny how that happened.)

Meanwhile the General had emerged into the open, flanked by soldiers but unarmed herself, and Poe was reminded yet again: he could charm, sure, but Leia Organa—weaponless, armorless, and bareheaded under the D’Qar sky—could _command_. 

Poe opened his cockpit hatch but didn’t disembark, keeping his hands on the controls for his lasers, as the freighter’s airlock door started to slide open with a rush of burnt-sealant smell. The door got stuck after only a few inches, but was wrenched further open by an unseen hand. 

“Weapons first,” the General ordered. “Show yourself.”

A blaster and two stormtrooper helmets arced out of the gap in quick succession, clattering loudly against the freighter’s side as they rolled to the ground. Two pairs of hands came next, gloves removed, fingers spread. Both looked painfully small and slender.

“D-don’t shoot,” came a voice from inside. “Please—is he here? The First?” The Resistance soldiers were too disciplined to take their eyes off the freighter, but Poe caught their confusion. “The Resistor of Jakku?” continued the voice, and damn but he could _hear_ the capital letters in the words. “FN-2187?”

Poe took in a sharp breath. There was silence from the Resistance forces for a moment, and then Finn, still unsteady on his feet—he should be in bed, Poe thought—limped through the ranks of soldiers to stand by General Organa. 

“Uh, yeah, I’m here,” he called. “But, uh, it’s Finn, now.”

At that, the first pair of hands were followed by the close-cropped dark head and scuffed-armor-clad body of a young woman—barely more than a girl, really, since she couldn’t have been twenty yet, human-looking but with unusually large eyes. Part Keshian maybe, Poe thought. Making no sudden moves, she turned back toward the airlock, knelt on the edge of the opening, and gripped the second inhabitant of the freighter by the hand. Another girl, this one with braided hair and orange eyes, emerged, levering herself onto the freighter’s outer wall with a grunt and a wince. She stood, though Poe could see that she was leaning heavily on the first girl.

“Wait,” said Finn slowly, frowning at the second girl. “I know you. From squad-on-squad training. DA…”

“—4269, yes,” the girl said, eyes widening. She turned to her companion excitedly. “See? I told you he’d know us. The Resistor wouldn’t forget. He stayed with FN-2003 on Jakku, and he didn’t forget us.” Her sentence ended in a groan, and the other girl looked up sharply at Finn.

“She’s hurt. She was thrown against the main winch when they shot off the cargo hold, please, we need—”

“We want to join you,” DA-4269 interrupted, pushing herself upright even though her fists were clenched. “CT-1925’s a pilot, she can get pretty much anything off the ground, even half a freighter”—Poe didn’t miss the flash of pride in her eyes—“and I’m trained in nav programming.”

“She made sure no one followed us,” said CT-1925. “They were on us when we first took off, but we got into hyperspace clean. And we know you took the First, and he was sanitation, so you can take us too.” She lifted her chin and glared defiantly at General Organa, whose face had settled into the specific blank look Poe had learned meant she was hiding a smile. 

Finn hadn’t had time to master the General’s various shades of inscrutable, though, so he piped up, “I can vouch for them, General, at least, I knew DA-4269 from—”

“Enough,” said Organa, signaling for the Resistance to lower their weapons. “We’ll have time for that later.” DA-4269 sagged as if, safe now, she could finally give in to her exhaustion. The General waved a line of soldiers forward to help the two stormtroopers, or rather former stormtroopers, off the freighter. “Get a medic.”

Finn, unsurprisingly, was hobbling after the soldiers now clustered around the freighter, even though he looked like he might keel over any second. Poe hopped out of his X-wing and jogged over to catch up with him, BB-8 rolling along beside him.

“You are not in any shape to be climbing all over a crashed spacecraft,” he told Finn severely. BB-8 punctuated the rebuke with an unambiguous whistle.

Finn raised an eyebrow at the droid, then at Poe. “I know,” he protested. “I’m fine, I just wanted to _talk_ to them. DA-42—”

“And that’s another thing,” Poe said, talking smoothly over Finn. “They’ve got to have names. I don’t know how you manage to remember all those strings that sound like product codes—”

A strange look crossed Finn’s face, and Poe paused, realizing what he’d said, but Finn just answered, “You’re not wrong.” 

Poe didn’t ask which part he wasn’t wrong about, and ignored the anger kindling in the pit of his stomach. Nothing he could do today, but someday soon the First Order would pay. 

The others had lifted DA-whatever-her-number-was onto a gurney that they were rolling back toward the base. The second girl, CT-something, had glared down at the offered hands before jumping to the ground unaided and catching up to the gurney to take her companion’s hand. Poe thought she seemed like someone he could come to like, given time. 

“Resistor FN-2187—um, Finn sir?” DA-something called out tentatively. Poe suspected fatigue might not be the only thing making her voice shake.

Finn limped up alongside her, looking flummoxed. “Uh, just Finn is okay. Listen, we don’t go by stormtrooper designations here, you should have names.”

“Never had a name except my designation,” DA said.

“Yeah, Poe here gave me mine.” He staggered a little, and Poe planted one hand firmly between his shoulder blades and grabbed his elbow with the other. “Let’s see, you were DA-4269, right? DA-42… how about Daft?”

Poe only managed to refrain from smacking himself in the face because that would have meant letting go of Finn, who seemed not to realize just how much of his weight Poe was taking. 

“Finn, that’s not a—you can’t call someone…” He trailed off. DA-4269—Daft—was looking up at Finn worshipfully, and Poe realized she wasn’t about to give up a name that had just been bestowed on her by the Resistor of Jakku. He sighed.

“I guess it _was_ pretty daft to try to do what we did,” the girl murmured. “I like it.” Poe would have to sit Finn down and have talk about proper naming conventions sometime soon. Daft, meanwhile, smiled up at the dark-haired girl, who, intelligently, jumped in before Finn could get around to naming her. 

“I’m going to be Canto,” she said firmly. 

“Canto. Hey. I’m Daft,” said Daft, smiling.

“Hey, Daft,” said Canto, looking down at her, “it’s good to meet you.” For a moment the world seemed to narrow around them as their eyes locked and their hands tightened around each other. Poe looked away, because he wasn’t stupid and could recognize a moment of intimacy in which he didn’t belong, and realized belatedly that his own grip on Finn’s elbow had tightened. He forced himself to relax. Finn didn’t say anything; maybe he hadn’t noticed. 

Abruptly, Canto thrust her chin at Finn. “Is it true you rescued a dozen Resistance hostages?”

“Uh, no, there was just the one—”

“That would be me,” Poe put in helpfully.

“—and really we kind of rescued each other. But then Poe crashed the TIE fighter we stole—”

“Hey, I prefer to think of it as a strategic local-geology-assisted deceleration—”

“—and then I guess we both thought the other one was dead for a while.”

“Yeah, that part wasn’t fun,” Poe agreed. “The rest of it, though….” Finn spluttered because he had a decidedly narrow definition of “fun,” and staggered again, nearly slipping from Poe’s grip. Poe frowned at him, voicing what he’d thought earlier. “You should be in bed.”

“I’m _fine_ , Poe, I can’t waste time sitting in the medical bay when…” He trailed off.

“Why—” Poe started, and then stopped, peering closely at Finn. “Oh," he said instead. "Relax, she’ll be fine. Rey had no problem rescuing herself from Starkiller Base, remember? She can handle herself, and it’s not like she’s flying back into a First Order stronghold.” He stopped himself before mentioning where she _had_ gone in front of the two new deserters. Not that he didn’t trust the people Finn trusted, but it never hurt to be careful. “Besides, might I remind you that she’s not the one who came out of your foolhardy little lightsaber duel in a coma?”

“It wasn’t foolhardy, _he_ came after _us_!”

Daft spoke up. “You mean your lightsaber duel with Kylo Ren? Did that really happen?”

Canto scoffed. “Daft, don’t be—well, daft. _No one_ could survive a duel with Kylo Ren, definitely not a new stormtrooper.”

“Actually, that one is true,” Finn admitted slowly. “We did duel, but I was just holding him off, buying time. I never had a real chance.”

“And there were a couple days we didn’t think you’d survive it,” Poe added soberly.

“Yeah, and a couple days when I _wished_ I hadn’t survived it,” Finn groaned. 

“Which is why, ladies,” finished Poe, flashing them his most charming grin, “we will accompany you to the medical bay, before Finn here _falls over_.”

When they got there, it emerged that Daft had three broken ribs and pretty serious internal bleeding, and would eventually be fine but should thank whatever entities might be watching out for her that the medics had gotten to her when they had, so the rest of them (except for BB-8, who burbled something about finding R2-D2 and rolled off) retreated to the recovery wing while the medics did their work. Canto and Poe settled on either side of Finn’s bed. The dark-haired girl was tense and tetchy, constantly glancing over toward the surgery wing as if her overlarge eyes could see through the walls, until Finn reached for her hand and said, “You can trust them. They’ll take good care of her here. I should know, I’m still alive. They don’t decommission you even if you’re really badly hurt.”

Poe, felt anger flare up again, hot in his stomach, and completely missed whatever response Canto gave. _What kind of place did you come from, where injury meant being_ decommissioned, he wanted to ask. Still, despite the General’s frequent (baseless!) assertions to the contrary, he did have some sense of tact. He might be horribly fascinated by sordid stormtrooper reminiscences (not least because, terrifyingly, the more he learned, the more it explained about Finn), but he muttered an excuse about X-wing maintenance and left them to it. 

The only problem was that that left him at a loose end, until he decided that going over his X-wing wasn’t actually such a bad idea and made his way to the hangar bay. He grabbed a spare toolkit and tapped out the mechanic who had already started surface-cleaning his craft. She seemed happy enough to take a few hours off. Poe went over every inch of his beloved X-wing until she gleamed, letting the steady, methodical work soothe him; it was dusk by the time he finished, hit the showers, and went back to the medical bay to check on Canto and Finn.

He kicked himself afterward for leaving the two of them alone in the first place, because when he walked in Finn was hunched over with his forehead pressed against clenched fists, shaking, and Canto was saying, “That’s why she made me come with her. Well, that and she needed a pilot, but mostly she knew what would happen if she didn’t. I wasn’t going to leave, didn’t think we’d make it, but she wouldn’t let it go.” 

Finn raised his head at Poe’s entrance. His eyes held the same lost, haunted look they’d had when he had told Poe that Rey had been captured, and Poe wanted to grab Canto by the shoulders and demand, _What did you_ say _to him?_

“Go on,” Finn whispered, looking at Poe but talking to Canto.

She wasn’t looking at either of them; her gaze was fixed unwaveringly on an otherwise indistinguishable point on the wall. “It wasn’t just specific soldiers. They quartiled the whole FN squad, after Jakku,” she said softly. Finn’s head dropped onto his fists again. “But, Finn, don’t—I didn’t see it to start with, but Daft’s right, you’re the First. It’s because of you that we saw a way out. And the others—”

The door opened behind Poe, and a medic nodded at Canto. “She—Daft, you said?—she’ll be fine,” the medic said. “You can see her. She’s sleeping now, but she should wake in a few hours, and you can stay with her until she does.”

Canto was out the door instantly, without another word. Poe dropped into the chair she had vacated. He reached out to let his hand hover over Finn’s shoulder, but let it drop onto the bed railing instead. 

“Finn,” he started.

“You heard her,” Finn said bitterly, not raising his head, although Poe hadn’t heard, not really, not enough, but still too much. “Everyone who talked to me, who was seen to be friendly with me—they sent them to Ren. Because I left.” Poe couldn’t suppress a shudder, remembering his hours of Force-torture aboard the Finalizer. Sure, he’d been a mouthy little smartass at the time, because that was who Poe was, but he’d woken up sweating for nights after, certain that someone had been inside his mind. Finn continued, “I was an idiot, I didn’t think—but of course, I was a traitor so they had to make sure I hadn’t infected anyone else. When I was under, I felt—pain. Not mine. And when I woke up, I thought I dreamt it, but … I think some part of me knew. I was just too much of a coward to see it.”

 _It wasn’t your fault, it was theirs,_ Poe thought, but for once in his life he couldn’t find the words. “What did she mean, quartiled?” he asked instead, and could have kicked himself for opening his damn mouth. 

Finn went on in the same raw voice. “When a squad member shows cowardice, or if they disobey orders and it’s something important enough—or if they’re a traitor, I guess, but I think I’m the first one for that—well, we’re all responsible for our whole squad. If one soldier’s infected, they have to send a message everyone else. So they pick one out of every four squad members, doesn’t matter if you were close with the coward or the traitor or not, they just line us up in front of the whole base and take one in four. And they shoot them. Or airlock them, or send them to Ren to do—what he does. We’d watch them die, or we’d see them get taken and never come back.” 

“Fuck,” was all Poe could manage, the anger in his stomach giving way to a sick feeling. 

“Daft and Canto called me the Resistor, the First, and it was weird and awkward, but …” Poe heard what Finn hadn’t said: _but I also felt proud._ Finn let out a choked out laugh instead of finishing the sentence, looking up at last. “They should’ve called me the Stupidest. The Selfish.”

“Finn, they’re here because of you. Didn’t you hear them? They would never have even tried to make it out if you hadn’t done it first.”

“And what about the ones who didn’t?” Finn said viciously. “Who didn’t make it, didn’t try, because they were killed before the thought even crossed their minds?” 

Poe couldn’t think of anything to say to that, but when he started rubbing gentle circles over the slowly-healing muscles of Finn’s back, Finn didn’t stop him, and, after a minute or so, relaxed slightly into his touch. Finn didn’t stop him either when Poe slid his hand under Finn’s shirt, soothing circles now skin on skin, or when Poe brushed a kiss against Finn’s left eyelid, then his right. And when Poe moved to kiss Finn’s mouth, Finn kissed him back, raw and hungry and inept and too much teeth, but that was all right, Poe could handle that, could kiss Finn slowly and skillfully until Finn matched him for pressure and pace. Poe could guide Finn’s hands and use his own to say everything they didn’t have words for. It didn’t make things better but it made them bearable. 

Poe woke hours later, half-slumped over Finn’s bed with the railing pressing painfully into his stomach. Finn was asleep, mouth open, snoring lightly. Poe knew instantly why he’d woken: something that had been nagging at him the night before had finally slotted into place. He pulled the blanket up over Finn’s shoulders and went to find Canto. She and Daft had been given a small room to themselves next to the medical wing. A guard was posted at the door, but he nodded when Poe raised an inquiring eyebrow. 

Poking his head through the door, he saw that Daft was asleep, face lit eerily blue from the lights of the monitors she’d been hooked up to. Canto, however, was awake, even though the sky was still pitch-black outside, cloud cover masking the stars. She jerked her head in a terse _come-in_ gesture when she saw him. He guessed she probably hadn’t slept at all. 

He padded over to the bed, which stood between him and Canto. “How is she?” he murmured, nodding at Daft.

“Alive,” whispered Canto, almost wonderingly, mouth softening into the beginning of a smile. Then she grimaced. “How’s the—how’s Finn?”

Poe found he wasn’t angry anymore, at least not at Canto, anyway. He shrugged. “He’ll get there, with time.” He smiled crookedly. “We maybe worked some things out.”

Canto eyed him with a look that was far too knowing for a girl her age, but all she said was, “That’s good.” She paused. “I guess I didn’t expect him to be so—so human. He’s the First. The Survivor of Starkiller Base, who never misses a shot, who can, I don’t know, blow up a Star Destroyer with his brain. Daft was the one who obsessed over those stories, but I guess I kind of started to believe them too.” She shook her head.

“Finn—well, he’s just _Finn_ ,” Poe said. “Don’t get me wrong, ‘just Finn’ has done some pretty spectacular stuff, don’t tell him I said that, but he’s as human as any of us. Well, except Admiral Ackbar. And BB-8. And—”

“I know what you mean.” Canto wrapped her arms around herself. “Daft saw that too, somehow. That he didn’t get out because he was a legend, but he became a legend because he got out. Which meant it was possible. For us as well as him, maybe.” She reached out to smooth Daft’s hair away from her face. 

“Listen,” said Poe, growing serious. “Something you said, last night, right before the medic came in.” Canto stared at him, huge eyes luminous. Poe drew in a deep breath. “About ‘the others.’ What others?” 

“Other stormtroopers like us. Who want out. Others who would follow the First and defect. Others who believe that FN-2187 lives.”

“How do we find them?”

Canto bit her lip. “You can’t. But—but maybe they’ll find us.” She held Poe’s gaze, unblinking. “We left a message, pegged to the freighter’s coordinates. Or, Daft did, anyway. Someone we trust knows how to find it—and I swear he’s the only one,” she added quickly, seeing Poe open his mouth to interrupt. “Look, I know there’s a guard outside our door, and that’s good, I’d think you were the biggest muckbrains in the galaxy if there wasn’t, but we’re not stupid enough to risk betraying our only hope of surviving. The message is coded, and no one else even knows what to look for. But if our, our friend”—she stumbled over the word, seeming almost surprised at how it sat on her tongue—“can decrypt it, he’ll know what we tried to do. What we did.”

Poe nodded slowly. “How did _you_ find us?” he asked.

Canto gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Got lucky. We were on mop-up and salvage after Hosnian Prime. Plan was to get out from there, make for a neutral system somewhere. But then we ran into one of your squadrons, and Daft managed to plot a tail. We just followed you back.”

Poe raised his eyebrows. “We didn’t have a tail. I was on that mission, and I _know_ there’s no way anyone could have followed us.”

Canto grinned fiercely, her first full smile since she had clambered out of the damaged freighter. “Daft could. You don’t know her, she’ll be your best nav officer inside a week.”

Well, that was useful—and deeply alarming—information to have. 

“You should tell the General,” said Poe eventually. “She’ll want to know.” The sky was beginning to lighten outside, and he turned to go. At the door, he paused, half-turning back to Canto. “And get some sleep. You’ve earned it.”

Finn was stirring when he got back, and looked disoriented, but he came fully awake as Poe eased himself back into the chair by his bed and watched realization dawn.

“Look, Poe, about last night—,” Finn started, and Poe saw the look on Finn’s face and saw what was coming, and cut him off before he could get there.

“I’m not sorry,” said Poe steadily. “Are you?”

There was a long silence. “No,” Finn said at last. “I’m not either. Rey—”

“—probably has a pretty good inkling of how you feel about her, and you ought to know she barely left your side between when you got rescued and when she left.”

“She—she did?”

“Absolutely she did. Shame you were unconscious, you missed out on what could’ve been some really great moments.” It didn’t really show on Finn’s skin, but Poe could tell he was blushing, and grinned. “So what I’m saying is, you should take the opportunity of her being away to become a really, really good kisser.” 

He started counting in his head, and got to nine before Finn realized his mouth was hanging open. 

“Yeah, okay,” said Finn slowly. “Yeah.”

So they spent that night together as well, and the next after that, and then Poe had to go fly a mission but when he came back, Finn was out of the medical wing, so they spent that night and the next in Poe’s quarters. 

They were a week in, long enough for nights to become routine, when the second shuttle arrived, cobbled together from spare parts and held together, as far as Poe could tell, by sheer wishful thinking. This time there were three stormtroopers inside. Finn, of course, was flabbergasted, but Poe just smiled, half fond and half exasperated, as the Survivor of Starkiller Base named the newcomers Blaster, Weeby, and Way. 

Blaster was tall and brash and acted as if he already knew everything anyone told him about the Resistance base or D’Qar. Finn appeared to find this irritating and intimidating by turns; Poe saw through it immediately. Weeby was quieter, and for some reason latched on within a day to Jess Pava, who treated her new shadow with the same bemused tolerance a person might have toward a small animal that decided to make itself their pet. Way was the oldest of the three, which still wasn’t all that old—she might have been around Poe’s age—and had a serene assurance that seemed to ground the others. 

They all—even Blaster, for all he tried to hide it—looked at Finn as if seeing a ghost, or some mythical creature brought to life. Poe could tell that it made Finn uncomfortable. Not that it was hard to tell when Finn was uncomfortable, because he got all tongue-tied and wide-eyed, and frankly Poe suspected that spending his life behind a mask meant that Finn had never learned to regulate his facial expressions.

“They look up to you, you know,” Poe told him later that night. “That’s not a bad thing.”

“They call me the Resistor of Jakku, like it was some big hero stunt,” Finn said. “But I didn’t _do_ anything. I just—I had to get out because I couldn’t fight. I didn’t even plan on joining the Resistance. I was just trying to escape!”

“Yeah, sure. You don’t get it, the point is you did get out, and you did join the Resistance, and your reasons for doing it—” _didn’t have to be noble,_ he wanted to say, _but think about it. You had no problem fighting when it was Rey’s or my life in danger. It wasn’t battle-panic stopping you. It was the thought of killing innocents._

He kissed Finn instead, slow and deep. When they pulled apart, he said, “Look, all I’m saying is, a little-hero worship isn’t the worst thing, not if it gets them to leave the First Order. So maybe just go with it, Capacitor of Jakku.” That earned him an involuntary half-smile, which he kissed into a real one.

Poe was feeling pretty good about that until the next day, when Blaster caught sight of him and shouted, “Hey, that’s him! The pilot that FN-2187 rescued! That’s the Resistor’s second-in-command!”

“ _Second-in–_ hey! _I’m_ the one that flew us out of there!” Poe protested, calmly and with dignity and definitely not in an affronted squeak. He looked at Finn, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt: maybe he wasn’t aware of the extremely aggravating smirk crossing his face. “All right, that’s it. No more feeding your ego, Casualty of Starkiller Base.” 

Once General Organa had finished debriefing the new arrivals, Finn and Poe took the three of them to see Daft and Canto, even though Way was the only one who had actually known them as First Order stormtroopers. Daft, who was well enough now for short walks and occasional shifts reprogramming the Resistance’s oldest navigation systems, reached out to grip forearms with Way.

“DG-1010 told me I might find you here,” Way said, in greeting. “Said if anyone was crazy enough to survive defecting, it’d be you.” DG-1010, Poe guessed, was the “friend” Canto had told him about.

“I thought he’d be with you,” Daft said.

Way nodded. “That was our original plan. But then it turned out we needed a distraction. He stayed behind to provide it. Said he’d try to come along with a few others later. He wanted to give it about three weeks to let things die down a bit. But he’ll come.” 

As things turned out, it was fortunate that they had some warning about when to expect the third ship, because otherwise they might never have found it. It was Snap, running recon near D’Qar’s star, who caught a faint signal and found a TIE fighter drifting perilously into the star’s gravity well. The TIE fighter was almost out of fuel, with barely enough energy left to power life support. Snap would have disabled it and stripped it for salvage, but a series of flashes from its one working laser, too evenly spaced to be random noise, tipped him off to the fact that someone inside was still alive. He shot off the laser cannon, just to be safe, and then grappled the fighter with a tow line and plotted a trajectory back to D’Qar.

He sent warning, so a small group of soldiers, including Poe, Finn, and all of the other former stormtroopers, was assembled and ready when Snap returned. He brought the TIE fighter down gently, pulling it around by the tow line so that it settled hatch-side up.

“Weapons first,” called General Organa, as she had when Daft and Canto had first landed. “Then show yourselves.”

They waited. Nothing happened. 

Finally, Snap went over to the TIE fighter, pulling a wrench from his belt. Poe trained his blaster on the hatch, covering Snap, and out of the corner of his eye saw Testor and Weeby doing the same. Snap levered open the hatch and jumped immediately to one side, putting his back against the TIE fighter’s outer shell. When nothing continued to happen, Snap cautiously drew his own weapon and peered into the craft. 

“There’s someone in here,” they heard him call, and then, “They’re conscious.” A low, indistinct voice spoke briefly from inside the TIE fighter, and then Snap pulled back and turned to look at Finn. “They’re asking for you.” 

Finn really had no reason to look as amazed as he did, Poe thought, and shoved him gently forward. He didn’t let his blaster waver for a second, though; Finn hadn’t even drawn his, and Poe was damned if he’d let him go anywhere near a First Order craft without cover.

Finn was perhaps four meters from the TIE fighter when the stormtrooper emerged, armored and helmeted but with their hands extended, carrying no weapons. In an almost ceremonial gesture, they removed the helmet, revealing a woman with high cheekbones and weathered skin. Despite the fine web of wrinkles that creased the corners of her eyes and mouth, Poe suspected she was younger than she looked.

“FN-2187. The Deserter,” she said, tucking her helmet under one arm and raising the other in a sharp salute that Poe didn’t recognize, but that made him shiver. 

“No, please, don’t do that,” Finn said pleadingly, falling back a step. “I’m not—you don’t need to—just call me Finn. And put your hand down.”

After a second, she did, but when she spoke, her voice hadn’t lost its stiff, stilted tone. It was almost like she was reciting a rehearsed script. “Finn the Deserter. I would join you. I am—”

“DK-3360.” Finn turned. It was Way who had spoken. “I know you.”

“Yes,” said the stormtrooper, sounding uncertain for the first time. “No. I … I _was_ DK-3360.” Her eyes glazed slightly, as if she were looking past Finn at something on the far horizon. “But before that … I was … I was someone else. My name … When I was small, and lived on the ice, I had another name. I … think my name was Oura Kess,” she said, voice growing firmer. She focused on Finn again. “I lived on Arkania, and my name was Oura Kess.” 

“Oura Kess,” Finn said, extending a hand to her. She reached out for it tentatively, as if unsure that her own hand wouldn’t pass straight through his, then gripped, hard. 

Daft spoke up. “Are there others with you? Dag—I mean, DG-1010—was going to ….” She stopped at Oura Kess’s stricken look. “What is it?” 

The lines around Oura Kess’s mouth seemed suddenly etched deeper. She let go of Finn and turned to Daft. 

“DG-1010 was decommissioned and terminated,” she said in a monotone. Daft wordlessly shook her head. Oura Kess went on, relentlessly, and Poe got the sense that if she didn’t force hereself to say it all now, she would never say it. “He helped me plan to get out, but he was overheard telling me about FN-2187. Someone heard him saying that the First lived and that others had followed. He was betrayed. They knew I had listened to him, and they asked me if I believed him.” She closed her eyes, and with a visible effort opened them again to look at Daft. “I said no. I swore I didn’t, but my captain told me I had to prove I hadn’t been infected with his poison. He took me to DG-1010 and gave me a blaster, and said, ‘Show me.’ And … and I did it.”

Canto interrupted, eyes narrowed and vicious. “You shot him?” she hissed. Oura Kess winced. Canto took a step foward, but Daft grabbed her. “He helped you and you shot him? He was our friend, don’t tell me he was decommissioned and _terminated_ when you _shot_ him. It should’ve been you! It should have been you instead of him.” She spat at Oura Kess’s feet.

“Canto.” Daft’s voice was soft. “She had to. It was a better death than he would have had.”

Oura Kess nodded. “They would have given us both to Kylo Ren,” she pleaded. “They would have torn the location of this planet from his mind.” Canto just glared.

“How did you get out after that?” Finn asked gently, into the silence; strangely, that seemed to settle Canto as much as Daft’s grip on her arm. Oura Kess, too, took a breath at the sound of Finn’s voice and looked steadier, though it was a few seconds before she spoke.

“I shot my captain. Right after I…. I turned around before I could think about it and shot my captain, and ran. There wasn’t time to get any of the others who were going to come with us. I don’t think any of them got caught, but I don’t know. I just ran. And then I thought I’d fouled it all up anyway when I dropped out of hyperspace with the nav dead and the fuel burned up, but….” She glanced at Snap.

“But you made it,” Snap finished. 

Oura Kess nodded. She looked slowly back at Finn, then at each one of the other former stormtroopers. “I will remember DG-1010,” she said.

“As will we,” Daft answered, and Way echoed, “As will we.” Canto looked at the ground.

Finn told C-3PO to make sure that PZ-4CO, who oversaw bunk assignments, quartered Oura Kess in a different barrack than the one Daft and Canto had been housed in, but it turned out they needn’t have worried. Although it took weeks for Canto to stop being tense around the newest defector, she didn't threaten her again.

As time went by, Oura Kess seemed to relax a bit more as well. She didn’t say much to anyone except Way and Finn, and sometimes Daft, but Finn told Poe that, away from the First Order’s influence, she was remembering more and more of her early childhood on Arkania.

“I think the others might be a bit jealous, actually,” Finn said, during a skirmish near Hevurion. The planet had been aligned with the New Republic, but its senator had struck a backroom deal with the First Order, which started kidnapping Hevurion’s children to train as stormtroopers, and was now flying in supplies to establish a planetside base. Poe was determined to stop the kidnappings and, as a bonus, make construction of the base as difficult and costly as possible.

“TIE fighter on your left,” he told Finn, who had joined him as gunner for the battle. It meant that Poe could fly something with much bigger cannons than an X-wing. Of course, his X-wing would always be his first love, but he had to admit, as he caught a glimpse of the TIE fighter spiraling wildly out of control, that these cannons were pretty sweet. “Jealous of what?”

“Of how Oura Kess can actually—dammit, Poe”—as Poe rolled to avoid enemy fire—“remember her past. None of the rest of them have”—Finn paused again, this time to take efficient aim at another approaching enemy and send it veering into the fighter behind it—“any idea where they came from.” 

BB-8 warbled behind him, and Poe said, “Good idea. Hang on, I’m gonna get you a better angle on their shield nexus. Sit tight.” It ended up being a bit trickier than he’d planned, because the First Order Destroyer had a second, hidden, set of dorsal cannons, so he had to fly in at a steep angle against the planet’s gravity and skim along the hull of the enemy ship itself. Finn cursed and Poe felt the edges of his vision going fuzzy from the G-force, but willed himself to focus just long enough to thread them through the cannon fire. It was worth the discomfort when Finn managed to knock out a layer of shields, which let Blue Squadron pour through to wreak beautiful havoc. Poe saw Blue Six in tight formation behind Blue Three, which was Testor, and grinned. He knew he’d been right to add Canto to the pilot roster. 

When they were out into relatively clear space, he asked Finn, “What about you?”

Finn knew right away what Poe meant. “Guess I’m a bit jealous too. I was taken pretty young. I think.”

Poe couldn’t say much to that, but he swooped in to give Finn a clear shot at the Destroyer’s starboard engine. He hoped his message was clear: _We’ll stop them. They won’t do to anyone else what they did to you._

On their way back to D’Qar, with the adrenaline rush fading, Finn seemed quiet. Poe would have said he was brooding, if Finn had been the brooding type. Poe didn’t ask what was bothering him; Finn would bring it up on his own eventually, which he did about an hour after they landed and changed out of their flight gear. 

“The stormtroopers on Hevurion,” Finn said. “The ones we killed.”

Poe wasn’t surprised. “I know,” he said. “But you can’t think like that when they’re shooting at you. Finn, the First Order was taking Hevurion children, and killing their families.”

“We should’ve offered them a surrender,” Finn insisted stubbornly. “They should’ve had the chance to defect.” Poe sighed, but didn’t contradict him. He knew what Finn wasn’t saying: _Those stormtroopers used to be kidnapped children too._

Daft and Way agreed with Finn when he posed the question to them, and so did General Organa when the three of them brought it up to her, but that raised another problem: Oura Kess had told them there were more who wanted to abandon the First Order, but she’d also said that DG-1010—Dag, as they had posthumously named him—had destroyed Daft’s message. Dag hadn’t shared the information of where to send defecting ships with anyone except for Way and Oura Kess; with him dead, unknown numbers of other defectors would have no idea where to go. 

To everyone’s surprise, it was Weeby who came up with the solution. Testor had to coax him into explaining it to the Resistance leaders, but when she finally marched him into a meeting and said, “Go on, tell them what you told me,” he squared his shoulders and spoke. 

“You’re intercepting some of the First Order’s messages, aren’t you?” he said. 

General Organa exchanged glances with Admiral Ackbar. 

“Yes,” she said cautiously. They weren’t getting much—mostly just fleet-wide mass broadcasts, which were almost entirely propaganda and thus tactically of little use. So far, they hadn’t caught any intra-Command communications. 

It turned out, however, that fleet-wide propaganda was exactly what Weeby wanted. “If we pull a man-in-the-middle on their mass broadcasts,” he said, “we can hijack their platform to send our own message.”

“We can’t just telegraph our coordinates to the entire First Order fleet!” Admiral Ackbar objected.

But Oura Kess, whom the General had been questioning about the number of potential defectors, was nodding. “We won’t. We’ll send them a dragon.”

“What?” Poe asked, thrown.

Oura Kess blushed. “It used to be a game, between my—my brother and me. Legend has it that there once were dragons on Arkania, who could breathe fire, and fly into places no other creature could reach. If there ever were, they’re extinct now, but still from time to time someone claims to have seen one. So my brother and I used to tell each other, ‘Come outside and look, I think I saw a dragon!’ whenever one of us wanted to get the other away from the adults for a secret talk. When we got a bit older we started writing each other messages in code, and we called it ‘sending a dragon.’” She looked down. “My brother got taken at the same time I did. I don’t know what happened to him.” Poe put a hand on her shoulder.

Weeby hesitated, then continued, “It’s like Oura Kess said. We write an encrypted message into part of a broadcast and forward it, and everyone who’s farther out than we are from central command gets our version. And then they pass it on, and the”—he half smiled—“the dragon spreads.”

“It’s a risk,” the General said eventually. “But I think it’s one we have to take.”

Weeby and Oura Kess eventually settled on the idea of hiding coordinates for a drop point in the image code for the First Order insignia, stamped in the corner of every propaganda vid. That way, they could slip new coordinates into the vids every day, minimizing the risk of an ambush. When they inserted the first set of coordinates into a test file, the result was that the First Order’s spiked wheel looked almost imperceptibly off; only a sharp eye would catch the slight elongation of the spikes or the subtle change in the colors. It was a small enough difference that most would attribute it to spontaneous transcription error; despite all of the advances in communication since the Galactic Civil War, such minor data corruption persisted. Hopefully, though, someone among the potential defectors would catch the change and investigate further.

After they’d settled on the code, Weeby told them he needed a keyword or phrase that recipients would need in order to unlock the rest of the message. “Something only a defector would be likely to try,” he cautioned. 

Daft was the one who supplied it: “FN-2187 lives.” 

Their dragon worked. The next ship that arrived was a mid-sized troop transport, and it carried not only more than half a squad, but also a group of about ten trainees. Poe’s throat seized up when he saw them emerge from the transport in two files; these really were children, the biggest no older than ten. 

“Lieutenant N’Tuvo,” their leader introduced himself, pretending to ignore the solemn, wide-eyed child who had edged up to him and snaked a hand through his belt. “MZ squad and trainees, reporting for duty.” 

General Organa stared, compassion and horror warring in her eyes. “They needn’t fight,” she told him. “None of you have to, who do not wish to, though we won’t turn away those who do. For the rest—well, I can’t guarantee we won’t give you shifts in the greenhouses or nitrogen farms, but you are welcome to stay, and stay in peace. We can quarter the chil– the trainees here for as long as you need.” She lowered her voice, speaking only to Lieutenant N’Tuvo. “Do any of them have families we should find?”

N’Tuvo frowned. “Families?”

“Parents, siblings? Other kin?”

He swallowed. “MZ squad’s their family now, sir. I—we’d like to stay together, if we can.” He didn’t say more, but he didn’t need to. They all knew that, in most cases, the First Order killed as it kidnapped. N’Tuvo was just confirming what they’d already guessed, even if they hoped it wasn’t true: the children’s original families were almost certainly dead. 

Finn stepped forward. He looked at the lines of cadets, eyes impossibly sad. “You can stay together,” he said firmly. 

“But sir, it will be most difficult to find sufficient bunk space for—,” Poe heard C-3PO start, but the General silenced him with a look.

Lieutenant N’Tuvo was staring at Finn. He had the same look Poe knew from the faces of the solitary nomads and lost travelers on desert planets who managed to make it to an oasis or trading outpost, and saw water for the first time in days. “You’re him,” N’Tuvo whispered, “aren’t you. The First. FN-2187.”

“Yeah, I’m him. You can call me Finn.”

N’Tuvo turned to his squad, drawing a deep, shaky breath. “We follow the First!” he called.

In unison, down to the smallest cadet, they responded, “We follow the First.”

N’Tuvo turned back to Finn, who looked like he was hoping the ground would swallow him on the spot. 

“We follow you, F-Finn,” N’Tuvo said, and suddenly he was weeping, silently and uncontrollably, but he stood his ground, ramrod-straight although he was trembling like the smallest breeze might shatter him, as the tears spilled from his eyes and coursed over his cheeks and splashed onto his collar. Finn reached out a helpless hand toward him.

The youngest cadet, the one holding onto the lieutenant’s belt, broke the silence. 

“Lieutenant Tuvo’s crying.” She looked around to see who else had noticed this unprecedented development, then withdrew her grip from N’Tuvo’s belt, reaching up to tug on his hand. “Lieutenant Tuvo, why are you crying?”

N’Tuvo’s throat worked. He didn’t seem to be able to speak, and when he didn’t answer, the child started to cry as well. “Lieutenant Tuvo, don’t cry. Stormtroopers don’t cry.” 

Poe’s heart nearly broke; the trainee couldn’t quite manage the r’s in “stormtroopers.” One of the former soldiers from MZ squad broke ranks to kneel down in front of her. “Shh,” the stormtrooper murmured, “it’s okay. He’s only crying because—because he was scared for all of us, but it’s okay now. We’re safe.”

“Yeah,” managed Finn, letting his hand finally fall on Lieutenant N’Tuvo’s shoulder. The lieutenant went utterly still at the touch, squeezing his eyes shut. Poe had seen soldiers look like that in the instant between when they got hit and when they fell. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

He and Finn were rough with each other that night without needing to talk about it, all force and tension and resistance as they exhausted themselves almost feverishly against each other’s bodies. They held each other as dawn bled upward along the horizon, Finn weeping against Poe’s shoulder as he hadn’t in front of the defectors. Poe felt the tight headachy sensation behind his own eyes that, when he was child, had presaged tears, but they remained unshed, his eyes hot and stinging and too-dry. 

Morning, though, was better, partly because they both woke feeling lighter, and partly because N’Tuvo was able to look at Finn without breaking down, but mostly because it brought Rey, gliding the Falcon smoothly into the hangar and running down the ramp to meet them. Chewbacca emerged behind her, making for the command center.

“Finn!” she cried, throwing her arms around him and knocking all the air from his lungs. She’d filled out a bit—strong in a wiry way before, she was clearly eating enough now to put on some real muscle. “You’re better!”

Finn’s smile widened. “You’re back!” he exclaimed, unnecessarily. “You—you look good.”

Poe stifled a laugh, because that was Finn’s blushing-invisibly voice. He waited for a chance to catch Finn’s eye, and raised a suggestive eyebrow. Finn stared at him in panic for a second, oblivious to Rey’s excited chatter, and then visibly gathered his courage—and kissed her.

“Mmf,” Rey said, surprised, and then, in quite a different tone, “mm.” After a long moment, Finn stepped abruptly back and let her go, moment of daring exhausted. “Mm,” Rey said again, “what was that for?”

Finn clasped his hands nervously behind his back. “Um, I guess that was because I’m really happy to see you?” he ventured. 

“Oh,” said Rey brightly. “I’m really happy to see you too,” and she grabbed his shoulders and planted a second kiss squarely on his mouth. This time, Poe didn’t bother to stifle his laugh. Hearing him, Rey whirled around and cried, “Poe!” and before he could speak she’d grabbed him and kissed him too. It was Finn’s turn to break out laughing, and Poe couldn’t blame him; he guessed the look on his own face would be pretty funny if he could see it.

“It’s great to see you, Rey,” he said, “though we didn’t expect you back for at least another month.”

Rey grew serious. 

“The people who arrived here yesterday,” she said carefully. “We sensed them.”

“You sensed…”

“Master Luke and I, yes.” Poe took a moment to appreciate how casually she said the name of the last Jedi, who had flown off years ago and been missing ever since. “We felt them coming.”

Finn broke in. “Okay, what kind of ‘training’ are you doing, because I thought I just heard you say you sensed them. From Ahch-To. In time to arrive here the day after they did, which means you must have left _before_ they did. You have got to tell me how this Force stuff works.”

“Yes, in a minute,” said Rey, “but the important part is there were children with the group, weren’t there.” It wasn’t a question. “Some of them—three, to be exact—are Force-sensitive. Master Luke wants me to test them. And then, if they want, take them back with me to train.” She had a look almost of wonder. “We wouldn’t be the only Jedi left.”

Finn, to Poe’s surprise, was looking furious. “What? No, you can’t do that!”

Rey stepped back, confused. “Finn, we need the Jedi back. There is no balance without them.” 

“Balance? The only family those kids have is their squad. You can’t take them away! Do you even hear what you’re saying? You want to take them to some hidden planet far away from everyone they’ve ever known to turn them into—into weapons!”

Poe stepped in between the two of them before Rey could answer. “Finn,” he said, low. “Easy.”

“Didn’t you hear her?” Finn cried.

“Yeah, and MZ squad and kids aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. But this is _Rey_ , right?” Finn subsided, breathing hard. Poe turned to Rey. “Care to explain?”

Rey was staring at Finn. “It’s not like you said. I won’t take them if they don’t want to come, of course I won’t, and anyway to become a Jedi you have to want it. But they’ve probably already noticed they have different—abilities. That they can sense things other people can’t, or feel some kind of energy around them, or make things—align for themselves, in ways that don’t happen by chance. Finn, I know what it’s like to grow up different, never knowing what any of it means. They should know. They should have the choice.”

Finn, usually an open holotext, had a strange, unreadable look on his face. “Okay,” he said at last. “I guess that—makes sense. But you should talk to their leader first.”

Rey nodded. Poe looked from her to Finn and back. “You good?” he said, eyeing them both. 

Rey nodded again. After a second, Finn said, “Yeah,” and smiled broadly at Rey. 

It would later turn out that two of the three Force-sensitive children would want to go with Rey, but they wouldn’t know that for a while. In the meantime, they had a few days of simply reveling in each other’s company, hearing Rey’s stories about Luke and Ahch-To, and filling her in on the events of recent months on D’Qar. They introduced her to the stormtrooper defectors, and she made fast friends of Daft and Emzi, the stormtrooper from MZ squad who had broken ranks to comfort the crying trainee child (she had refused, bafflingly, to give up her stormtrooper designation, tolerating at best an abbreviation from MZ-8192 to Emzi). 

Poe thought that for once things were actually going pretty well: Finn and Rey were both around, Poe himself had a few days’ break from flying missions, General Organa had cracked a smile at one of his jokes—and the stormtrooper children thought that, except for Finn (and, he had to admit, Rey, when she could be convinced to play with them), he was just the _coolest._

So now, having just gotten word that Blue Squadron's recon wing had picked up a fifth defector ship at the drop—another troop transport this time—and that they would be breaking atmo in less than an hour, Poe was happy to bring the news to Finn.

“There are _more_?” Finn squawked. “ _Now?_ ” He glanced over at Rey, who was hastily pulling her wrap back over her shoulders.

Poe grinned, zipping his flight suit and shrugging on his vest. “You started a trend, buddy. Sorry to interrupt, but it’s time to get out there and wow the crowd. I’m flying escort again, wish me luck.” He turned to go, but paused at the door. “Wait,” he said slowly, frowning back at the two of them, “that’s _my_ bed.”

Finn shrugged, looking sheepish but not terribly remorseful, and Rey just gave Poe a look, as if to say, _Oh, is that so?_ Poe shook his head—it wasn’t as if he minded, really—and headed to his X-wing.

Finn and Rey had emerged from the base by the time he was in the air, and although Poe usually didn’t spare much time for sentiment, he let himself enjoy a moment of pride to watch the two of them standing there, side by side, emblems of hope for the whole Resistance, and—better than that—his friends.

Smiling, he pulled his X-wing into a steep climb to meet the descending ship. 

That was when the ship opened fire on him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Contains references to a murder committed under duress (offscreen), kidnappings, and child soldiers.
> 
> Props to those of you who caught the Firefly reference.
> 
> The "dragon" is a nod to the Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow series—yes, I have serious problems with OSC's politics, and yes, those books were still deeply important and formative for me.


	2. Interlude: Infection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, bad news and good news.
> 
> The bad news: I'd planned to post Chapter 2 by today, but Chapter 2 went and exploded all over my plans. It got a lot bigger and more complex than I anticipated, and I don't want to post until it's as good as I can make it. That, however, requires time—and unfortunately this is the beginning of final exam hibernation period, so Chapter 2 probably won't be up until late May-ish.
> 
> The good news: The new plan is to split up the remainder of the story into two more longer chapters, with interludes in between. This means a bigger (and hopefully better) story, even if the wait is longer—and for now, what started as a prologue-y bit at the beginning of Chapter 2 has been expanded into the first interlude. 
> 
> See endnotes for warnings. 
> 
> Sorry about the extended cliff-dangling! You're all wonderful! *goes and hides in the stacks*

Word spread.

_FN-2187 lives._

It reached the Triumphant-class Star Destroyer _Devastator_ , where the whisper raged like an engine fire and could not be stamped out. 

Those who spread it were careful, never so obvious as to gather too many together in one place, or seek each other out overtly in the training rooms or mess halls. Yet a careful observer, watching long enough, might have begun to see the patterns: one faceless stormtrooper would pause for a moment at a table, clasp hands briefly with another, and then move on, inserting herself into a different group. A few minutes of quiet talk, and then that group would split, each member finding another table or another cluster to join. 

A careful observer might have seen how the groups ebbed and flowed, never quite the same from shift to shift, yet always carrying the same current, the same whisper.

A careful observer might have seen a whisper become a password, a mantra become a movement—until the day MV squad reported to a simulation exercise to find the words burned into the floor of their training room:

_FN-2187 lives._

It reached squadrons on starships across the Unknown Regions, and bases on remote planets and moons, and as it spread, other designations were whispered in its wake. _DA-4269. CT-1925._ And more— _DK-3360_ , _WB-9285_ —always with the same message: _They followed the First._

Slowly, some who listened began to add: _We, too, follow the First._ When these stormtroopers told the story of FN-2187, they would always say it was their own starship from which he had escaped, always their own base that he had deserted. Their listeners would say, _But how could he have done that? What about the radiation shields? What about the ground-to-air missiles?_

Those telling the story would pause and fall silent, but that day or the next, others would take up the tale: _He broke into the generator room and shut the shields down. He disabled the missiles by hacking their target temperature range, so they fired back onto the ice bluffs._ And so the story became a way for those who believed it to begin planning their own escapes. They did not know where they would go, or when, but they knew they would be ready when the time came. 

_FN-2187 lives._

It reached DQ squad, an elite unit whose brutal efficiency on recruitment missions have given it a longstanding record for number of trainees acquired. DQ-6056, who had a knack for identifying the households with multiple children, where the squad would be able to collect more than one trainee candidate, listened to the story in silence. That night, he dreamed of ice and screams and blaster fire, and a voice that might have been a young woman’s or an older child’s crying out a name he couldn’t remember when he woke. The next day, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, which already made him look older than he was, seemed etched even deeper than usual. He kept his helmet on, though, so no one noticed.

On their next mission, he refused to fire his blaster. 

He was sent in for reconditioning and returned with his old skill and determination seemingly renewed, though a few of his closest squad-mates found him somewhat quieter than before. 

On the mission after that, he turned his blaster on his own squad, though he didn’t shoot to kill. He simply stood alone in the doorway of a farmhold, blocking the rest of the squad's fire with a piece of corrugated metal from a ruined animal pen, while the two families who shared the farmhold escaped, disappearing into the maze of ravines that scarred the badlands to the east. 

He didn’t hold out for long after that. Within minutes, his unit subdued and captured him, and he spent the return journey in their starship’s brig, which had only ever housed newly acquired trainees before. DQ squad delivered him in electromagnetic cuffs to General Aksari, who ordered that he be blindfolded and suspended for three standard days from a catwalk between the mess hall and the bunks, where every trainee and stormtrooper would see him as they walked to every meal. When Aksari had DQ-6056 taken down at last, he was parched and stinking, too weak to stand, arms and torso raw where the bindings had cut into his skin. After three days behind a blindfold, he cowered from even faint light as though it would burn him. 

General Aksari offered DQ squad a choice: see that the traitor in their midst found a fitting end, or be quartiled. So, with the whole starship watching, they tied him upright to a grate in a training arena and arranged themselves in ranks before him, blasters drawn. 

_This is what befalls a traitor,_ Aksari shouted. _When we vanquish the Galaxy, there will be no room for traitors in our ranks. Loyalty! Discipline! Strength! These will carry you through the conquest to come. And if any among you are weak, or undisciplined, or disloyal, show them no mercy. This is what befalls a traitor!_

The assembled stormtroopers raised their arms in a sharp salute, and DQ squad took aim. DQ-6056’s lips moved, but without water his voice had failed days earlier, and so his words went unheard. 

When the blaster fire subsided, what was left didn’t even look like a body. 

The general raised his own arm in salute and roared in wordless triumph, and the ranks of stormtroopers roared back. In the rush of noise, Aksari never noticed that three members of DQ squad were not shouting. They were the same three who had fired a hair before the others, killing their former comrade with clean shots to the head before the remaining blaster fire could hit; they were the same three who had gazed most intently at the last movements of DQ-6056’s lips, and read the words there:

 _FN-2187 lives._

It reached former captain Phasma, who certainly hoped so. She hoped that she would someday see FN-2187 again, so that she could thank him for forcing her into the trash compactor on Starkiller Base. She hoped that she would get the chance to tell him he had saved her life. She would explain to him that the Base’s refuse was never simply jettisoned into space, but carried off on preprogrammed scows to prevent the debris from interfering with the sensitive shields. She would tell him how she broke into a scow and hacked its routing code, escaping with seconds to spare when the quakes tore the planet and its weapon apart. 

She would not, she thought, tell him how the First Order had brutally tested her loyalty when she revealed herself again to General Hux, nor of the punishment she had endured when Hux found out that she had been the one to let the shields down. But she would tell FN-2187 that she had survived, and that it was the humiliation she had suffered at his hands that made her escape possible.

Then she would shoot him for his treachery. 

Phasma hoped that FN-2187 lived, so that she could be the one to kill him.

In the meantime, she would not squander his unintended gift: she would survive. No matter that Hux had relegated her, along with the other dregs and malcontents and failures of the First Order army, to a remote, bleak planet so small and distant that it had no name. No matter that they were forced to spend each day in cramped tunnels, mining the planet’s bedrock in search of kyber crystals. No matter that this was a vain quest as far as Phasma could see, since this planet was about as likely to have kyber crystals as Tatooine was to have tauntauns. Her posting here was a punishment, not an assignment. But she would survive. 

That was what she told herself when their water cycler broke down, and they watched their cistern of drinkable water dwindle almost to empty while they waited for the nearest First Order base to send them a replacement part. It was what she told herself when their meager above-ground barracks were nearly leveled in a sandstorm. 

She didn’t have to tell herself again when an earthquake caved in a mineshaft entrance, trapping her with another squad-mate in a tunnel. Drillbit was sharp-featured and laconic, even more taciturn than the rest of them, with just enough of an edge that no one tried to crack that silence to ask about their past, or the offense that had landed them here, or even their gender. Everyone on the mining based used nicknames rather than designations—rank was pointless because they’d all been stripped of it, and the fact that each of them was just as much a cast-off as the rest engendered a sort of grim egalitarianism—and Drillbit had been named as much for their penetrating glare as for their tireless ability to keep digging long past when anyone else would have succumbed to fatigue or claustrophobia. 

Phasma was mentally trying to calculate whether anyone would bother to rescue them, and if not, whether their air or their water would run out first, when Drillbit spoke unexpectedly out of the pitch darkness beside her.

_We’re not going to die._

_No,_ said Phasma.

They were silent for a while, and then Drillbit spoke again. _I’m getting off this rock someday._

Phasma raised an eyebrow, though she knew in the darkness Drillbit couldn’t see it. _How?_

 _It’s been done,_ Drillbit said. _There was a stormtrooper. FN-2187._

 _The First,_ Phasma said, her voice carefully colorless. _Yes. I know._

She heard Drillbit shifting, angling their body toward her, so she wasn’t surprised when a hand gripped hers. 

_I didn’t think you were part of the movement, Phas. It’s good to know._

Phasma thought about whether it would be easy to smash in Drillbit’s skull with a rock—she’d never killed barehanded before, only with longer-range weapons—and whether she’d stand a better chance of survival alone, with no one else using the precious air. She thought, too, about the fact that she’d just heard more words from Drillbit than they’d ever uttered at one time, and that they’d called her _Phas_ , and that they had said _We’re not going to die_ instead of _I’m not going to die_. She thought about how, based on the position of their clasped hands, she would know roughly where to hit in order to incapacitate her companion, except that the tight grip they had on each other would also telegraph a strike. She thought about the patience it had taken to rise to Captain, and the patience it took to get through even one rotation of this desolate planet, and the patience it would take to have her revenge on Hux and FN-2187 both. She thought about saying _I’m not part of the movement_ , and taking the consequences, and she thought about how the hand gripping hers was rough and warm. Instead she said:

_FN-2187 lives._

Eventually, it reached General Hux himself, though he had to force the truth of it from a frightened lieutenant who’d been careless enough to mention the dissension in the ranks, and stupid enough to try to backtrack afterward. 

Hux didn’t attempt to hide the problem from Supreme Leader Snoke, because unlike the unfortunate former lieutenant he was neither careless nor stupid. He could see Kylo Ren standing at the Supreme Leader’s shoulder in the hologram, and spared a moment’s disappointment that Ren had survived after all. At least whatever “training” he was receiving meant he was, for the time being, no longer Hux’s problem. Hux never pretended to understand the Supreme Leader’s interest in Kylo Ren—yes, the brat might be Force-sensitive, but he was also temperamental and unpredictable, which in Hux’s opinion made him worse than a nuisance: a threat. 

_So, you have attempted to contain this … contamination?_ Snoke said, interstellar static giving his sibilants an extra hiss. 

_We have disseminated propaganda, Supreme Leader, and punished those most closely involved with the defector,_ Hux said quickly. _We have told the remaining troops that FN-2187 was a programming error, that he did not survive his attempted defection, and that he was a despicable traitor. And yet the rumors don’t die._

Kylo Ren interrupted. _Master, let me kill them. All of those who contemplate betrayal—every one of them should die._

Hux was spared from pointing out the idiocy of that idea by Snoke himself, who raised a hand to silence Ren. 

_Patience. You have learned much of the Force, Kylo Ren, but little yet of history._ Snoke focused again on Hux. _There persist primitive planets whose inhabitants, ignorant of the true path to power, make deities of anything they cannot understand: their animals, their ancestors, even the Force itself._

 _Master?_ said Kylo Ren. Snoke ignored him; Hux took his cue and did the same.

 _And killing a few adherents of these false faiths is like … cutting off a hand, when the brain still thinks and the heart still beats._ Now the Supreme Leader glanced at Ren, addressing him as well as Hux. _Better that we use the hand to strike at the heart._

Kylo Ren still didn’t look satisfied, but Hux understood, and bowed.

 _See to it, General,_ said Snoke, the implied threat heavy in his words, and cut off the connection.

Hux knew his task. It would not be enough to find and punish the would-be traitors. But he could use them. They would lead him to the Defector, and he would make FN-2187’s end as prolonged and humiliating as possible. He would make sure that every stormtrooper under his command saw incontrovertible proof, not only of the Defector’s death, but of his impotence against the First Order’s strength. After all, as Hux knew better than anyone, FN-2187 was only a man, and a man could be destroyed. And once those who believed the rumors saw their deity defeated and their comrades broken, their movement would crumble. 

Hux smiled thinly.

 _FN-2187,_ he thought, _will die._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Contains fairly graphic depictions of torture, an execution, and references to kidnappings and child soldiers.
> 
> The garbage scow idea is borrowed from Firefly (from the episode "Trash").

**Author's Note:**

> Excerpts of this story were originally published, with permission, [here](http://deliciousupholstery.tumblr.com/post/142250159190/signal-boost-for-revolutionary-finn-fic). delicious upholstery has asked me to pass along their sincere apologies for sharing a teaser and then promptly falling off the internet.


End file.
